[ale] Red Hat upgrades?

[The Don Lachlan]

Mike,

Really? Really?

Maybe you missed my statement of, "That works for you - great."

Who's doing all the QA work to verify applications work across versions?
Who's checking that updates within a release of Fedora don't break things?
Who's taking servers out of rotation every six months to upgrade them?

I'm glad you're lazy, but I don't have that kind of time EVERY SIX MONTHS.
Lots of people don't have that time EVERY SIX MONTHS.

I repeat, "That works for you - great. It's not going to work for a lot of
other people, myself included."

-L


On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 06:12:58PM -0400, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 17:29 -0400, The Don Lachlan wrote: 
> > On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 04:19:36PM -0400, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> > > 2) You can run at least 13 months.  The Fedora edition is not EOL'ed
> > > until the initial test versions of the +2 edition are posted.  F15 is
> 
> > 13 months is a pretty short window to me. If you're staying one revision
> > back, it means that upgrading to N-1 on the day N is released gets you at
> > most 7 months of production time and every 6 months you're running new
> > versions of the OS through the SLC.
> 
> > That works for you - great. It's not going to work for a lot of other
> > people, myself included.
> 
> Now mind you, I work with (not for) an IT department for a major
> international company that have taken that attitude at times that left
> them sitting on Solaris 8, in some cases, for ages because the upgrades
> are so painful (switching from Solaris to RHEL was less painful than
> Solaris 8 to Solaris 10).  RHEL 5 to RHEL 6 takes hours of downtime and
> adapting.  I did it in my VM's from CentOS 4 to CentOS 5.  You know what
> the "upgrade" path is?  You provision an entirely new VM and build it
> and migrate your data.  And it takes hours of work for one machine...
> Man!  Virtualization makes that work sooo much easier, and yet...  Net
> time, an upgrade from RHEL 4 to RHEL 5 for a major data center can take
> weeks and involve a lot of people depending on the number of servers.
> Slowlaris -- forget it.  Solaris 11 and ZFS has the right idea.  They
> can do live backup snapshots and upgrades and they can roll forward and
> backward.  We're not quite there yet.  Getting closer...  I don't say
> these things because I have not experienced them.  I have been there and
> done that.  I'm sorry.  I'm just too bloody lazy to work that hard.
> 
> Now, lets see...  Every six to 12 months upgrading...  Oh, interesting,
> I can type (cut-n-paste) 6 commands into 30 or 40 windows one right
> after the other remotely turning them loose in maybe 15 minutes if I'm
> really slow.  Oh, wow.  I use a package cacher (pkg-cacher) so it only
> downloads the big stuff once.  Oh wow...  30 servers are done in under
> an hour (after the first one) and not a single error and the down time
> for them is less that 5 minutes each?
> 
> Really?
> 
> Really.
> 
> Yes there can be gotcha's, particularly if you are a Postgresql fanatic
> like I am.  If I do a version upgrade I do need to backup and dump the
> databases and restore.  Oh well...  You learn and you do and you SCRIPT.
> Yes, it helps if you keep your servers in coherence and they have the
> same set of rpms (I try - Fedora is easier there too).  Yes, you
> sometimes have to resolve some conflicts but then you have this dump of
> your databases and you can cut-n-paste the uninstalls between all the
> machines just as fast.  I can do 30 machines using yum and have them all
> up in running in less than the down time of a RHEL single server upgrade
> when they go to to a "major upgrade".
> 
> I can live with that every 6 to 12 months.  And I laugh my ass off at my
> IT people that complain that the server is going to be down for 12 hours
> for an upgrade (just because they can not predict what's going to break
> or how long it will take to fix it)...
> 
> You guys work too hard and I'm a lazy bastard with better things to do.
> Fedora works for me.
> 
> > -L
> 
> Regards,
> Mike
> -- 
> Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
>    /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
>    NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
>  PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!



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